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Tom’s Tech Tips

Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: Internet Explorer 8 – Must Have or Must Have-Not for Legal Nurse Consultants?

From the beginning – let me disclose a conflict of interest, I’m a Firefox user. I’ve flirted with Apple’s Safari but find it is too slow to render its pages, and it’s got the worst search function ever designed for looking for text on a web page (although it does tell you how many matches there are on a page). I’ve customized my Firefox browser to include my favorite blogs, news and RSS feeds and, even though it’s a little slow to open the first time you fire it up each day, I love the fact that I’m tuned in to the world every time I jump on the Net. It’s great the way I can do tabbed browsing, with a simple right-click opening pages from my Yahoo! searches in a new tab so I’m not clicking forward and back to get to my search results after a page pans out. It’s also cool to be able to look up forgotten passwords for websites that deleted my “cookies.”

With my built-in bias, I downloaded and installed Internet Explorer (IE) 8. I’ve had IE7 installed for some time and have always found it a little clumsy. In fact, the only reason I have used it is to access the Windows® Update website and keep my Windows XP OS and Office programs patched up. I didn’t like IE for general web surfing and had a latent fear of all its vulnerabilities I’m always reading about. Firefox seemed like the best way to practice “safe surfing.”

Now that Microsoft® has released IE8, a number of Certified Legal Nurse Consultants have asked me whether or not they should upgrade. My answer is an unqualified “yes.” IE8 is probably the best version of the IE browser that Microsoft has released. It’s supposedly safer than ever and when you open a new tab, instead of seeing a blank page, you can choose to open previously closed tabs as well as other options. It offers a so-called smart address bar feature (that I’ve turned off in Firefox and dislike in Safari) that offers sites from your browser’s history as you type in an address. It also has better options within the “delete browsing history” function that gives you better control over what data (even website-specific data) you want to keep or delete.

When you click on the “x” to close an individual page, it asks you if you want to close all tabs or just one. There’s a new filtering service you can select which will display a warning page prior to visiting any site that is deemed to contain malware or that might be a phishing site (security risks). Something really cool is that IE8 highlights the core domain name of the website you’re visiting to help you avoid sound-a-like or typosquatting sites. To help make this a safer browser than previous versions of IE some other security improvements have been added. On the negative side, IE8 may not display all websites the way they’ve been designed to be viewed – not everyone will catch this – but it offers a “compatibility mode” that will allow you to see a website to view the “broken” site correctly and it will remember those sites for you, switching in and out of compatibility mode automatically.

In short, any legal nurse consultant that uses IE on a regular basis should upgrade to IE8 and then keep an eye out for upcoming patches. I also recommend that you make sure you have all the current high-priority Windows updates installed prior to moving to IE8. The upgrade process is easy to download and install. It kept almost all the customizations to my iGoogle homepage (including my cool theme), RSS feeds, etc. This is a definite upgrade that I’m sure I’ll come to appreciate the more I use it and so will you.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

2 thoughts on “Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: Internet Explorer 8 – Must Have or Must Have-Not for Legal Nurse Consultants?

  1. So Tom, will you be moving away from Firefox? You have mentioned several times how much you like it, but sounds like you might be leaning toward IE8 now. The tech at work just told me to install Firefox and use it rather than IE. I am running IE 8 right now.

  2. Joyce,
    I’m planning on staying with Firefox, partly because it’s safer and I do like it more than IE whether 6, 7 or 8. IE8 is still a good browser and I need it for my Microsoft Updates which makes it a necessary evil. It also gives me some variation in search because I have different customized “home” pages in each browser (Yahoo! in Firefox/iGoogle in IE8).

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*The opinions and statements made by Vickie Milazzo, the founder of Medical-Legal Consulting Institute, Inc. are based on her experiences and expertise, should not be applied beyond the specific context provided, and do not guaranty or project actual results. Vickie Milazzo is no longer involved in the operations or management of the business, but is involved as an independent education consultant.

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